Sonia Sotomayor pays emotional tribute to her mother

By MICHAEL SAUL

DAILY NEWS POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT|

May 26, 2009 | 11:24 PM

First she thanked the President for bringing her there.

But the most memorable, poignant scene came later, when Sonia Sotomayor paid loving tribute to the elderly woman in the front row, quietly dabbing a tissue at her eyes, for the heroic sacrifices that got her there.

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"I stand on the shoulders of countless people," the Supreme Court nominee said. "Yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor."

"My mother has devoted her life to my brother and me. And as the President mentioned, she worked often two jobs to help support us after Dad died," Sotomayor, 54, said. "I have often said that I am all that I am because of her, and I am only half the woman she is."

The audience was transfixed, many in tears themselves, at a story that was at once classically American and one of a kind - her mother's determined role in launching her daughter on an improbable journey from a South Bronx housing project to nomination as the nation's first Latina Supreme Court justice.

President Obama specifically asked the crowd to acknowledge Celina Sotomayor, seated in the front row with her son, Juan, a doctor from Syracuse, prompting an extended round of applause.

"Sonia's mom has been a little choked up," Obama reported, eliciting sympathetic chuckles from the crowd.

The President himself recounted for the crowd Sotomayor's upbringing and what he called her "extraordinary journey."

Sotomayor's father was a factory worker with a third-grade education who didn't speak English. He died when Sotomayor was 9, and her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for her two children.

Sotomayor grew up in the Bronxdale Houses, a sprawling, 26-building low-income project of seven-story apartment buildings in Soundview just north of the Bruckner Expressway.

"Sonia's mom bought the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood," Obama said. "[She] sent her children to a Catholic school called Cardinal Spellman, out of the belief that with a good education, here in America, all things are possible."

The family's pride was shared by people still living in the Bronxdale Houses, where drugs and gangs ruled in meaner times.

Lorenzo Taylor, 62, who has lived in the projects for more than three decades, said he "never would have imagined" someone who grew up there would be on the verge of donning the robes of a United States Supreme Court justice. "It's great because she grew up in this neighborhood and knows the people," Taylor said. "It's just like [when] Obama was voted President - I never thought I'd see it in my life."

Cynthia Diaz, 35, a nurse who lived in the projects for 13 years, said, "It is a proud moment, of course, to see someone who came from our neighborhood accomplish something."

Life experience, the President said, is what gives a person a common touch, a sense of compassion and an understanding of how ordinary people live.

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In his remarks, Obama chronicled Sotomayor's hardscrabble upbringing and the challenges she's faced as a diabetic, diagnosed when she was a child. She was told then the disease meant many career options would be closed to her.

"Well, Sonia," Obama concluded, "what you've shown in your life is that it doesn't matter where you come from, what you look like or what challenges life throws your way."